


Wanting It More

by gloss



Series: River Bubbles: Various Locked Tomb AUs [1]
Category: Gideon the Ninth | The Locked Tomb Trilogy - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Earth, Alternate Universe - Garage Band, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29949549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: Garage Band AU. Gideon's late to rehearsal, but this time she's got a good reason.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: River Bubbles: Various Locked Tomb AUs [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2202708
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	Wanting It More

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Luscious Jackson. Originally posted on DW 8/22/20.

Of course Gideon is late to rehearsal. She has never been on time for anything in her life.

"She'll be here," Camilla says when Harrow's rant runs down and trickles away.

"Eventually, anyway," Palamedes says.

"Maybe she got lost," Harrow says wistfully as she peers out the window. The band rehearses in the apartment over Harrow's parents' garage; the place hasn't been redecorated since Nixon's presidency. It's all avocado green and harvest gold, nubbly plaids and sheer curtains. "Maybe her car flipped and she's stuck in a snowbank and no one will find her til spring."

"That's it, yeah," Palamedes says and fiddles more with a knob on his guitar. "Think positive."

They hear Gideon's arrival well before they see her; her Shit-mobile's lack of muffler makes it audible from blocks away. Then, once parked, the engine takes its sweet time quieting down. It's still ticking and rattling well after Gideon has slammed the door and clomped up the outside stairs to their rehearsal space.

"Ta-fucking-DA," she announces, throwing open the door and spreading her arms. "Look upon me and despair! How hot am I? I am become HOTNESS itself, melter of panties, destroyer of girls."

They're yelling at her to get inside, close the door, she's letting all the cold air in. Gideon complies, eventually, but not before turning slowly, one way, then the other, to show off her new look.

Her hair, never much more than a tangle shoved out of her eyes, has been, in a word, _mulletified_. Shaven at both sides, but not high enough to qualify as a faux-hawk, gathered in waves at the top that lengthen, inexorably, down the back of her skull.

"No," Harrow says as soon as Gideon shuts the door. "No, absolutely not."

"You have some objection?" Gideon drops her her oversized wool overcoat on the floor, stomps the snow off her boots, and throws back her shoulders. Her sleeveless flannel shirt is one size too small and stretched over her chest. "To my looking fucking _awesome_?"

"You look terrible," Harrow says. She stands in front of Gideon, looking up at her, and it's hard to tell if the loathing contorting her expression is for the mullet itself or Gideon. Then again, she has more than enough bile in her skinny little frame for both. "Even worse, because when do you not look terrible? But now you also look _stupid_."

Gideon practices running her hand through the top of her hair. She wants it to look effortless, like she has far better places to be and people to argue with. "Whatever."

"Whatever, _what?_ " Harrow asks.

"Whatever what?" Gideon parrots. Two dark patches rise in Harrow's bony cheeks. "Just because you insist on looking like the secret love child of Robert Smith and Nico and Morticia Addams doesn't mean the rest of us don't know style."

Hearing that, Palamedes snorts and Gideon grins. He glances at Harrow, whose face is pinching into an even scowlier scowl, and says, "She's not wrong."

"She's not right, either," Harrow tells him.

"Plus, Cam likes it," Gideon says.

"I didn't say that." Camilla's flipping a drumstick through her fingers and doesn't look up.

"But you didn't say you _didn't,_ either."

Camilla smiles a little while Palamedes puts in, "She's got you there."

"Thank you, Boy Wonder."

"Breathtaking logic, truly." Harrow pinches the bridge of her nose. It's just so difficult to be her. "I'm surrounded by morons."

"You say the nicest things," Camilla replies. "We're so lucky to know you."

Moving into position behind her keyboard, Harrow gives her a humorless little snarl. "Can we just get this over with?"

"Sure." Palamedes slips his guitar strap over his shoulder. "Nothing says rock and roll like hating everyone in the room, right?"

Instruments at the ready, the three of them look expectantly at Gideon.

"I just got here," Gideon says.

"Because you were unconscionably late, yes," Harrow says.

"I need to chill first."

"You absolutely do not."

"What would you need to chill from?" Camilla asks as she taps out a quiet little march. "You're the chillest person this side of a morgue."

"Thanks, but —" Gideon flips the tail of her mullet back and forth to feel it against her neck. "Where's the fan club? How can we play without 'em?"

"We managed just fine before you dragged them in," Harrow says.

"Yeah, but..." Gideon trails off as she looks around, her hands on her hips. "It's cooler when they're here."

Harrow rolls her eyes. "Jeannemary will kiss your ass next time, I promise."

"She's got a rugby scrummage," Palamedes says, punctuating each word with a strum on his guitar. "Isaac's at the allergist. Or the dermatologist. Possibly the otolarynologist."

"Big words for a skinny-ass dude," Gideon replies as she finally shoulders her bass.

"Orthopedist," Camilla says quietly, just before taking a deep breath and counting down. They launch into their cover of "Kids of the Black Hole" before segueing into an uptempo thrash of "My Girl".

Their band is pretty terrible. They don't even have a name, because Harrow keeps vetoing both Gideon's genius suggestion — _Lyk'd Her_ , come on, it's _awesome_ — so in retaliation, Gideon reliably vetoes Palamedes' eminently sensible "Night Witches" just because Harrow doesn't mind it.

They play an ungodly amalgamation of death metal and emo and...maybe surf punk? No one's quite sure what it is Gideon yanks out of her two-string cigarbox bass, just that it's unique.

"Groundbreaking and enthralling," Jeannemary calls it in her zine, "Get Griddled".

"Horrible death rattles from a malformed beast," Harrow said once before realizing Gideon took that as the highest compliment.

Palamedes is quite competent on lead guitar, Camilla is an excellent drummer with stamina for days, and Harrow was a harpsichord and glass harmonica prodigy before she joined up. Together, the four of them are still working out exactly what they want to sound like. Usually, like today, they sound like four separate dogs baying down their own individual paths.

After an hour or so, Palamedes and Camilla have to go, leaving just Gideon and Harrow together. Still jittery and exhilarated from playing, Gideon's searching for something, anything, to eat in the tiny bar fridge. Harrow makes a show of thinking about tidying up before she gives up and sinks down into the beanbag chair. It all but swallows her up; it looks like it's about to choke on a baby crow.

"This is bullshit," Gideon says, tossing an empty jar of mustard at the recycling bin.

"Yes," Harrow says. "It certainly is."

"What?" Gideon does a double-take. "What is? Why are you agreeing with me?"

"Oh, sorry. I thought you'd come to your senses about that ridiculous haircut." Harrow examines her nail polish. Newsflash: it's black and weirdly sparkly and chipped, just like always. She probably pays extra for precision chipping.

Gideon tosses back her head — like a proud stallion, one who'd never be intimidated by a scrawny little ferrety-face girl who insults her and laughs at her and makes her feel this particular nausea of feverish-underneath-chilly. "Shut up," she says. Then, even more brilliantly, she adds, "jackass."

Harrow exhales a long gurgling groan, annoyed and irritated and bored all at the same time, and lets her head fall back so her sharp chin juts at the ceiling. "Are we going to make out now or what? I have a chem test to study for and I'm sure you have...something...you ought to be doing. Remedial arithmetic? Civics for delinquents?"

"Community service," Gideon says, looming over Harrow, then dropping down, knee first, to crouch on all fours over Harrow. "Every other day, I have to go out and remind prissy stuck-up little assholes that —" She stops when Harrow lifts her face to meet her and bites her chin, and then they're kissing, and Harrow's clamping her thighs around Gideon's, and scratching her perfect-messy nails up and down Gideon's sleeveless flannel shirt, then grabbing at Gideon's hair and twisting, hard, exposing Gideon's throat and kissing her there.

Gideon gets her hand up under Harrow's thirteen layers of gauze and Lycra and funereal lace, finds the small swell of one breast, and has to murmur _aww yeah_ before their mouths meet again and they're arguing with tongues and teeth, breathless and wordless both.

"That's enough," Harrow says when Gideon tries to pull her shirt up. She sits up, dislodging Gideon to the floor, and pats absently at her skirt. "I'm going to go have dinner."

"Can I have some?" Gideon rolls onto her back.

"No."

"I'll eat in the kitchen. Your folks won't even know I'm there."

"But I'll know," Harrow says, pity dripping from her voice. "No, you get in that deathtrap of yours and head on back to whatever weird hovel you call home."

Gideon hooks her arm around one of Harrow's bird-skinny ankles. "Can't make me."

She's flying high from some _excellent_ mackage and nothing Harrow can say will get her down. She can still smell Harrow's lily of the (death) valley perfume on her hands and face.

"I don't think you want to test that," Harrow tells her, kicking her lightly. "Get up."

"In a minute, boss," Gideon replies, her eyes drifting closed. Kickass music, a pretty (if evil) secret girlfriend, and the world's hottest haircut: today, like every day, everything's coming up Gideon. "In a minute."


End file.
